ly savage at the time, and I vowed that, when I got a chance,
I would, figuratively speaking, put his nose out of joint. There was a
matter of some sixty thousand dollars at stake. If I put it out of his
way, it was a blow the fellow would feel, and he really deserved no
quarter. I jumped into a hack and went about my business, and it was
in this hack--this immortal, historical hack--that the curious thing I
speak of occurred. It was a hack like any other, only a trifle dirtier,
with a greasy line along the top of the drab cushions, as if it had been
used for a great many Irish funerals. It is possible I took a nap; I
had been traveling all night, and though I was excited with my errand,
I felt the want of sleep. At all events I woke up suddenly, from a sleep
or from a kind of a reverie, with the most extraordinary feeling in the
world--a mortal disgust for the thing I was going to do. It came upon
me like THAT!" and he snapped his fingers--"as abruptly as an old wound
that begins to ache. I couldn't tell the meaning of it; I only felt that
I loathed the whole business and wanted to wash my hands of it. The idea
of losing that sixty thousand dollars, of letting it utterly slide and
scuttle and never hearing of it again, seemed the sweetest thing in the
world. And all this took place quite independently of my will, and I sat
watching it as if it were a play at the theatre. I could feel it going
on inside of me. You may depend upon it that there are things going on
inside of us that we understand mighty little about."
"Jupiter! you make my flesh creep!" cried Tristram. "And while you sat
in your hack, watching the play, as you call it, the other man marched
in and bagged your sixty thousand dollars?"
"I have not the least idea. I hope so, poor devil! but I never found
out. We pulled up in front of the place I was going to in Wall Street,
but I sat still in the carriage, and at last the driver scrambled down
off his seat to see whether his carriage had not turned into a hearse.
I couldn't have got out, any more than if I had been a corpse. What was
the matter with me? Momentary idiocy, you'll say. What I wanted to get
out of was Wall Street. I told the man to drive down to the Brooklyn
ferry and to cross over. When we were over, I told him to drive me out
into the country. As I had told him originally to drive for dear life
down town, I suppose he thought me insane. Perhaps I was, but in that
case I am insane still. I sp
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